Hester's Daughters

Hester's Daughters is a contemporary, feminist retelling of The Scarlet Letter. Hester is born in Boston in 1929. Her Puritan community is immigrant Jews. Spirited and humanistic, she makes her way in the world much as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s heroine did, bearing an out-of-wedlock child, Pearl (whose own daughter, Aviva, is bi-racial). Narrated by Pearl, the novel recreates the pivotal events and characters of the classic work, then imagines Pearl’s and Hester’s lives through the lens of gender in contemporary America.